I had more to say, especially in light of the lack of reporting
of fan reaction in SOD. However, this was not sent:
I never felt that Todd and Tea were a couple who would
settle for mutual sickness, but rather felt that they were
struggling for health and love. Now the new writing regime
has Todd offering only sickness, and Tea accepting only
sickness. It was not sickness that held them together, but
something like a force of Nature.
Head Writer Megan McTavish has called Todd and Tea's
love story "non-traditional." On the contrary, it was Brontean,
Shakespearean, epic, Biblical and mythic. That's pretty
heavily traditional.
Did fans really find it agreeable that Todd abandoned
his daughter? That Todd and Tea's "beautiful relationship"
-- as one fan termed it in SOD* -- turned so cold, bleak,
depressing and despairing? What about fans, as SOD
claimed, "longing for a fairy tale ending"?** The writers have
Todd telling Tea he would "end the world" for her. He would
do that, but not try to change for her, as he was trying at
the time of their second wedding? Before Todd fled
Llanview, he asked Tea to give him a year to prove to her
that she had not made a mistake marrying him. Could this
be what he had in mind? A return to violence, and an offer
of sickness? This simply is not Todd as we last saw him.
But I will choose to view this "reunion" of Todd and Tea
as I would an ill-conceived attempt at a sequel to a classic
work of literature -- a pretender's usurpation and desecration
of another writer's brilliant work. SOD is very sympathetic
to fans who lost Another World. But my favorite story ever,
two years in the making, was destroyed in five days by new
writers with no understanding of what they were dealing
with.
* "Love It/Hate It," September 15, 1998
** "Mailbag," February 29, 2000
